


Birthday Boy

by RuinsPlume



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: A lot of kissing, Bisexual Character, Butch Character, Character Study, Despite the rating this fic tied for best smut in fwf, Frottage, Multi, Multiple Partners, POV Third Person Omniscient, Polyamory, Queer Character, Queer Themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 15:50:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12708069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RuinsPlume/pseuds/RuinsPlume
Summary: It's Sirius's 18th birthday. He wants a gift from everybody.Or:Swaying a little, James hesitates. He leans against Lily, and gives Sirius a shit-eating grin, a grin that is really a question:Are we going to kiss in such a way that everyone will know you’ve been sucking me off since fifth year, or are we going to pretend we aren’t that kind of friends and I’ll shriek afterwards?Sirius fixes James with a look. A look of,fuck you and your prick both, Prongs.A look that says,I expect the kiss I’m owed and not a millimeter of tongue less.





	Birthday Boy

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for Firewhiskey Fic, Bonfire Edition, for the prompt, "Sirius Black, the birthday boy." It won "Favorite Fic" and tied for "Best Smut"! :D It has since been edited.

**Birthday Boy**

Everyone who’s still in the Gryffindor common room at midnight knows what Sirius wants for his birthday. He’d come right out and said it, hadn’t he? And he wasn’t taking the piss, either; this is _Sirius._ Sex-on-a-stick, knife-blade cheekbones, mouth that looks made for cocksucking. Those thickly-lashed eyes, that bad boy vulnerability. If you listen closely, you can hear the wallpaper whispering that if the rumors are true, Remus is one lucky bastard. So when the tequila comes out, those not interested leave rather quickly for their rooms, some of them muttering under their breaths. Those who are left turn their eyes to Sirius, leaning cockily against the fireplace, downing a second shot and wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. Those who are left feel a little electrical circuit zing around the room, passing through each of them in turn: 

Marlene. Lily. James. Peter. Dorcas. Remus. Alice. Frank. And back to Sirius again. 

_All right then,_ says Sirius’s slow smile as his eyes scan the room. _Who’s first?_

Marlene. She’s got a reputation, more to do with her brassiness than with the amount of sex she has, which is actually not much because what she wants (which is Dorcas, but that’s another story) she hasn’t quite figured out how to get. She steps up to Sirius, nearly as tall as he is, and tugs on the loose end of his leather belt, pulling him against her. Sirius laughs in her hair, puts his arms loosely around her waist. Her breasts press against his chest, but not insistently. He likes that—the pressure, but not insisting. Her mouth is not too lipsticked, as most of the lipstick is now around the rims of various glasses littering the common room. They kiss and it’s as a kiss should be. Soft and promising nothing but its own sweetness, which it delivers with just the faintest wisp of tongue. Her mouth warm on his and then gone. Suddenly gone. Sirius would have liked a moment longer, but she’s gone, Marlene’s like that. 

Frank and Alice get up off the couch together and move toward where Sirius is waiting, his black jeans hanging low on his hips, his cheeks flushed with tequila and the heat of the fire. You’d think Frank and Alice would hang back, but it's occurred to them both that the drunker Sirius gets, the more hands are going to go more places, so they’d better take their turns now. And they go up together, because they’re already only for each other, Frank and Alice. If they were ten years older maybe they’d be having this conversation in bed: “Do you ever fancy...you know....inviting someone to join us?” But they’re only seventeen. Sirius has just turned eighteen. Hand in hand, they step toward the fireplace, both of them blushing furiously as if they share one circulatory system and maybe they do. 

Frank takes a deep breath. He’s no prude, it’s 1978, he’s got the _Ziggy Stardust_ album, he can do this. Especially if he’s holding Alice’s hand. With Alice beside him, he stands in front of Sirius and Sirius leans forward and fuck, their lips are actually touching, Frank’s kissing a bloke. He holds Alice’s hand more tightly. Sirius’s lips are soft like Alice’s, but the rough stubble on Sirius’s upper lip feels like Frank’s own. Is this how he feels to Alice? He wants to be Alice feeling Frank kissing her. He wants to feel everything Alice feels, that’s how much he loves her. So he leans into Sirius, and Sirius slips his tongue inside and Frank _is_ Alice, tasting Frank, the brush of stubble rough on his lips and then inside that, softness. Alice's hand is being squeezed hard and then he’s suddenly Frank again, and Alice is looking at him funny. 

“Your turn,” he says. Not knowing how to say anything more. 

Well. After that display, Alice is going to kiss Sirius a bit longer than she’d planned. She turns toward him, a mixture of jealous and titillated and afraid. She feels just like she did when she was a first-year and the Hogwarts staircase moved while she was on it, and all she could do was grip the banister as it swung her across all that space. She grips Sirius’s arms like that banister. Maybe that’s why he sort of falls into her, but instead of stepping back, she steps forward and then he’s all up against her. And okay, that’s his cock against her tummy, and he’s hard. And is this right? Well, her mouth seems to have decided it is, because she’s kissing him. She’s kissing someone who’s not Frank, and the staircase is swinging her away from Gryffindor tower, swinging her out of the castle entirely, Sirius’s hands on her waist and she’s upside-down, looking down at the astronomy tower through the wrong end of a telescope. 

When she opens her eyes and draws back, her knickers are wet. She turns to Frank. She’s mortified, she’s turned on, she’s upside-down. Sirius Black is a magnet that disrupts all compasses. Their needles are spinning, Frank’s and Alice’s, and where is true north? The two of them stumble back from Sirius, stumble into each other. Stumble out of the portrait hole and down to the Room of Requirement. Where they fuck for the first time. On the anniversary of this night the following year, their only son is conceived. 

James stands up. James. Sirius could fill a page with his name—jamesjamesjamesjamesjames. Swaying a little, James hesitates. He leans against Lily, perched beside him on the arm of the sofa, and gives Sirius a shit-eating grin, a grin that is really a question: 

_Are we going to kiss in such a way that everyone will know you’ve been sucking me off since fifth year, or are we going to pretend we aren’t that kind of friends and I’ll shriek afterwards?_

Sirius fixes James with a look. A look of, _fuck you and your prick both, Prongs._ A look that says, _I expect the kiss I’m owed and not a millimeter of tongue less._

Does Lily know about this? Yes, but not because James has told her. She and Remus decided together, months ago, that they have more power in knowing but not telling than in confrontation. Lily stands up then, and gives James a shove. A _man the fuck up James,_ shove. A shove that says, _If you expect me to put out ever again, you’d better do the same._

James knows what Lily’s shove means. He’s not stupid. And he’s a boy who likes getting his cock sucked by his best friend, especially given that Sirius is pretty much ready to put out any time, while Lily is more circumspect with her affections. 

But wait—Sirius has realized at the same time James has that they’re overdue for another shot of tequila, because things are getting entirely too coherent and it would be much better for everyone if they can claim drunkenness. James pours the shots at the rickety end table beside the sofa. James and Sirius lick the backs of their hands. They dust the damp spots with salt. They pick up the limes. Then:

salt lick (ah, Prongs!)  
shot slam  
lime suck  
mouth press

They go for it. Sirius wraps his arms around James and James’s arms go around Sirius as well. Fuck it, he can blame it on the tequila later. He has to go for it, when Sirius’s cock, hard through his jeans, rubs right up against James’s like that. And fuck, but he’s hard too. James cants his hips forward, because Merlin he loves Lily but there’s something about Sirius, isn’t there? Sirius’s tongue in his mouth, Sirius’s cock grinding against his, Sirius’s fingers in his hair, on his arse, pulling him in. Sirius whispering in his mouth, “It’s about time you kissed me, mate.” So James does. He kisses his best friend and something opens up inside James then, deeper and wider than he’d thought. Something about how much he loves this bloke. Something about how Sirius lets James shoot off in his mouth and isn’t ashamed of it. Like that's a place that maybe James could actually go and live in some time, the way Sirius lived in James’s room all last summer. A place he might actually like to visit for a while, just to exhale in relief. 

When the two boys break apart, there’s some laughter and catcalling. James has got a wand in the front of his jeans, and he doesn’t bother to hide it. He just ruffles his hair and sort of shrugs, his cheeks pink but his mouth grinning. Then he turns back and kisses Sirius again on the cheek, just to show fuck you all. 

A little ripple of relaxation eddies through the room. Like, if James did it, it must be okay. Sirius turns his gaze on Lily, because it was first FrankthenAlice so surely it should now be JamesthenLily?

But Lily stays where she is, perched on the arm of the sofa. She tilts her head back and grins at him, and the entire room understands without having the words for it that Lily is not interested in being a retroactive beard for James’s homo fumblings, thank you very much. That if and when she kisses Sirius Black it will be because she fucking wants to herself, and not because she’s preserving her boyfriend’s heterosexuality. And then Peter is standing in front of Sirius instead, his face flushed, his blond hair falling in his eyes. 

Peter. Christ, Peter. He’s actually a good-looking boy. If you took him away from James’s and Sirius’s sides and plunked him down in the middle of King’s Road in different clothes, you’d look at him and say, he’s a treat, isn’t he? With his bright blue eyes, so alive in his face. With that skin--the kind people call porcelain. Soft, soft, soft. A roundness to him, a sweetness to him, like a pastry you really want to eat. But with tea, not whisky. Maybe that’s the reason Peter doesn’t get more. “He’s off with some Hufflepuff girl,” the other Marauders like to say whenever they can’t find him, but it’s like Peter’s always nice-nice, never anything dirty about it. When it comes to Peter, everyone thinks lace doilies draped over a sofa. They don’t think bondage and blindfolds and begging. It makes Peter angry, that he’s doilies and not dildoes, that that’s what people see. He didn’t ask for that. He didn’t. 

He’s feeling all this as he stands in front of Sirius, his anger at being the sofa while Sirius gets to be the bondage gear. He's having other feelings as well, feelings about seeing James and Sirius kiss. Peter’s been just as good a friend, so why is it James who always gets to be on the receiving end of Sirius’s considerable generosity and not him? 

It’s a good question, and one that Sirius can’t answer except by giving Peter the longest, sweetest, slowest kiss of the evening. A kiss that starts out soft and turns hard and dark and tequila on Sirius’s breath and in his saliva which is in Peter’s mouth. And Peter is feeling ten thousand things and he doesn’t know what they are. He has to break the kiss because he can’t understand what’s happening in him and then the kiss is done. And he didn’t want it to be done but he doesn’t know how to ask for it back, and suddenly he’s furious at Sirius and he has to turn away before he punches him in his stupid face, and suddenly he’s near tears. 

Dorcas has been leaning against the far wall of the common room, a few feet away from Remus. Now she pushes herself off the wall and saunters across the floor. 

Dorcas is a bulldagger. Only one person in the common room knows this word (Remus), but everyone can see it, even if they can’t say what it is. Dorcas. Rooted, uncuttable. Massively broad and not a broad at all. She strolls over to Sirius and stands before him. Grinning, challenging, her hands on her hips. The firelight bright on the hard line of her jaw. 

It is 1978. No one in the room (not even Remus) has the words for what is happening in the space between Dorcas’s frank, not unsexual gaze at Sirius, and Sirius’s decidedly sexual and equally frank gaze back at Dorcas. It will be another decade before the word ‘queer’ slips into the lexicon in any way that might apply here; another two decades before a space exists that is wider than the ten inches between their two bodies, a space in which they might understand that the source of their attraction to each other in this moment is not in their genders, nor even in the fucking-with thereof, but in the embodiment of queerness itself. 

What is unimpeachably clear—so clear it hurts deliciously, like pulling off a scab, like the edge of an orgasm—is that there is sexual chemistry between them, between the butch dyke and the fey boy. Sirius widens his legs so that his head becomes level with hers without his having to stoop, without Dorcas having to stand on tiptoe. They kiss with their heads on the same level, Dorcas’s hand snaking around Sirius’s back. She steps her leg between his parted ones, and dips him backward. Sirius lets himself be dipped. Dorcas won’t let him fall. Her mouth is on his like a signature, like discharge papers, a signed release. _You can,_ her kiss says, _do whatever the fuck you want. I plan to. You should too._

It’s only after Dorcas has set Sirius upright again and gone to sit on the floor beside Marlene that Lily stands. She sidles up to Sirius and strokes his arm. 

“Hey, Lils,” Sirius says. It comes out intimate. He’s pretty sloshed by now, but that isn’t why.

Lily smiles back, soft and not-too-teasing. Intimate as well. They share James, after all, which leaves them feeling as if they know each other better than they actually do. Sirius feels like he’s fucked Lily by proxy as it were, and Lily seems to feel the same way, because she’s laughing, her wide mouth dimpling her cheeks, her red hair spilling in her eyes and her small (so small!) body before him very open, very game. And then she jumps up and Sirius catches her, her legs wrapping around his waist. He holds her to him and stomps around the common room with Lily hanging on. They begin singing the school song, badly, not so much because they’re drunk but because they don’t give a fuck about getting it right. Once they’ve made the complete circuit ( _hoggy warty warty warts,_ sung to two different tunes) and are back in front of the fireplace, Sirius hoists Lily a little higher on his waist, and she tips her face down to his, her red hair making a curtain around them. 

“Happy birthday, Sirius Black,” she murmurs. She smells good, in a girl sort of way. 

“Have some cake,” Sirius answers. James is the cake they’re both sharing.

“Don’t mind if I do,” says Lily, and tightens her thighs around his waist and kisses him. 

He tastes like drunk James, Lily thinks, except he’s Sirius. Kind of sweet, and yeah, she’s thought about it—who hasn’t? “Mmmmmm,” she says in his mouth. He sucks the tip of her tongue in between his lips and holds it a moment, then lets the kiss flutter open again. Soft against her mouth as he runs his hands down her spine, his kiss breaking into ripples over her skin. 

“Mmmm,” Sirius hums, like a promise of something. But it’s James they’ve each made the promise to. Separately. And so they let their bodies part again, their hips knocking together even as they separate. 

Well. All eyes on the one person who’s left, then. Remus, still leaning against the wall beside the spot where Dorcas was before she took her turn. But now Dorcas is close beside Marlene on the floor. Remus is alone beside the window when all eyes find him. 

He doesn’t move. He’s slouched against the wall with his knee bent, one foot flat against the wall as if he might push off at any moment and propel himself over to where Sirius is waiting by the fireplace. But he doesn’t. Remus—shabby, handsome, tall, sandy-haired, quiet until he’s not, smart, careful, always watching, watching, watching. Remus watches Sirius. 

And Sirius, the magnet, the birthday boy, the star brighter than true north, wheels through the night sky of the common room and leaves his post by the fireplace where he’s been kissed and kissed and kissed on his eighteenth birthday. He crosses the room, one step at a time. The room and all its inhabitants–even the portraits—hold their breaths. 

It’s one thing to be kissed by everyone in a game. It’s quite another to cross the room toward one person, especially when that person is Remus Lupin. Sirius walks slowly toward the quiet, shabby, handsome boy leaning against the wall on the other side of the room. Until he’s standing before him. 

“Hey,” Sirius says. 

“Hey,” Remus answers. 

You’d have thought Remus would be nervous, or embarrassed, because although they’ve done it quite a bit, it’s always been in secret, with silencing and disillusionment charms around them heavier even than the drapes around their beds. Or maybe you’d have thought Remus would be jealous, given how the evening has gone, and maybe you’d be right. But right now, Sirius is here.

“I saved you for last,” Sirius says softly. 

“I wanted you to,” Remus says. Realizing, as he hears himself speak, that this is true. 

“Moony,” Sirius says, leaning in, his lips brushing Remus’s ear, “take me to bed.”

“In front of everybody, you mean,” Remus says, his heart doing a leap his body didn’t know he could make. All evening he’s been watching and weighing himself against each other one, against every person kissing Sirius, every person tangled up in Sirius. But now it seems that each one was simply a stepping stone Sirius needed to cross to arrive at this moment, in which he stands in front of Remus and tells the world—and not even in words, but in motion, in flesh—that it was Remus all along. 

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Sirius answers, slipping his hand in Remus’s. He brings his other hand to Remus’s cheek. It’s the gesture of a lover, not a drunken adolescent. 

Remus closes his eyes for a moment. Just to be sure he’s not dreaming, that he’s really here. Tequila dizzies the air like the aftermath of candle smoke from Sirius’s cake earlier, when they all sang to him. But when Remus opens his eyes again, Sirius—okay, his _boyfriend,_ he’s going to let himself think it—is still standing in front of him, asking with his eyes now. Asking Remus to claim him, in front of all their friends. 

“Happy birthday, then,” Remus says, and without letting go of Sirius’s hand, in front of everyone, with his face burning and his heart exploding in his chest, he kisses the bloke he’s in love with. Then he pushes off the wall, and with his fingers still entwined in Sirius’s, he starts across the common room to the stairs, leading Sirius behind him. 

“Good night and thank you for coming,” Remus calls out over his shoulder. It might as well be, _Sirius and I are going to shag now, so please leave._

The others don’t leave, though, not yet. They all watch, motionless, as Remus and Sirius cross to the stairs. 

Sirius goes up first and doesn’t look back once. Remus watches Sirius’s arse in front of him as he follows, and only at the top does Remus turn, just to see for himself that the whole room is watching. It is, and whatever was jealous in Remus goes drifting off like an old leaf in the lake—too flimsy to make a boat out of. Remus is the shore and now he knows it. Sirius will always come back to land right here. 

Sirius turns too, leaning over Remus’s shoulder to blow a last kiss down to those below, their upturned faces shining in the firelight as if they were candles, and then Remus wraps his hands around Sirius’s waist and pulls him close, kissing him again. Remus kisses through all the other kisses of the evening until they can only taste each other. Sirius presses against him, matching the strength of his mouth, his hips, his hands. Their chests touch, their bellies touch. Their cocks, so hard, so ready, grind against each other. Even their toes, inside their shoes, are trying to make contact. 

“Come on then,” Sirius murmurs, his hands all over Remus as if Remus is a gift that Sirius has got to tear the wrappings off this instant. He steers Remus backward through the doorway to the bed. And then every other kiss is forgotten, like the forgotten embers of a fire that no longer needs stoking now that they’re tumbled into bed together. Unwrapping each other to get to the finer heat, the gift of naked skin.

**Author's Note:**

> The drunk!written, typo-ridden, crackier Firewhiskey Fic draft can be found [here](https://firewhiskeyfic.dreamwidth.org/14806.html?style=mine#cutid1)


End file.
